


Weighty Matters

by xylohypha



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, No actual dogs involved, Pedant fic, Shaggy Dog Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 07:13:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xylohypha/pseuds/xylohypha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A silly story from Bruce.  He cherishes every one of those he has.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weighty Matters

"It was a few years ago," Bruce said, "and I haven't heard any more about it since then, but I'm always kind of waiting for it to pop up in the news." He and Tony were sitting slumped on the bedraggled couch in the workshop, both of them loopy with exhaustion after spending most of the day herding vastly over-sized pillbugs into a containment area in Central Park to await trans-dimensional transport back home—once Reed Richards fixed his malfunctioning portal. Again. Why was it always arthropods? "Why is it always arthropods?"

"I don't think it is," Tony said. "We're probably just at a local maximum on the extra-dimensional arthropod invasion cycle. If I remember, I'll have JARVIS crunch the numbers tomorrow, and see if he can extrapolate anything from that and that run of gastropods we had six weeks ago. Some warning if we're due for swarms of saurians would be nice. Anyway, a few years ago?" he prompted.

Bruce blinked at him. Swarms of saurians. Gobs of gastropods? Armies of arthropods, packs of pillbugs. "Um. Oh, yeah. I ran into these three guys just after I'd sneaked across the border into Mexico one time. Actually _ran_ into them. The mouth of the tunnel opened up into an arroyo, and it was about three in the morning and overcast and I didn't see them until I bumped into the last guy in line. And then we all heard a truck coming and they hustled me out of there with them." Dirty hand across his mouth, arm twisted up behind his back, stumbling and trying his damnedest not to fall over the uneven ground, trying even harder to maintain his emotional equilibrium.

"After a while, there was a shack, and we had a chance to catch our breath, and it turned out that they weren't bad guys, they just really didn't want to be caught and put back where they'd come from. They didn't want to give me their names, but once I convinced them that I knew how they felt about being kept somewhere you didn't want to be—" Bruce gave Tony a wry grin, "and agreed entirely, we got along fine.

"We had more than that in common, too, though I didn't let them know that. The place they didn't want to be put back in? Was a lab. Where they'd been the experimental subjects." Bruce paused and breathed carefully for a minute. He could feel Tony making himself relax beside him, so he didn't take too long about it. As nice as it was these days not to have sharp things poked at him experimentally whenever Tony got a little bored or curious, when a little bored graduated to more than a little bored, it'd be asking more of Tony's self-control than he might be able to muster right now.

"It was a government lab, and one of those ones that doesn't get very much supervision. My new friends wound up there after signing some papers they were told would get them out of the local lock-up faster. Well, it did that, but if the small print on the contracts had been complete and accurate, they'd have known ninety days on the road crew would have been the better choice."

"You know where this lab was?" Tony asked, idly smoothing and folding the wrapper of a candy bar he'd dredged up from between the couch cushions. "Desert southwest, right? If you know enough details, then satellite imaging, energy signatures, and JARVIS ought to let us find it and—"

Bruce gave him a sidelong look. "And nothing. My arroyo friends let me understand that when they left, the lab was still standing, but the man who'd been responsible for crafting the experiments performed there—wasn't. I've kept an eye on the journals where anything relating to that project might have been published and there's been nothing."

"Non-disclosure agreements?" Tony said. The candy bar wrapper was now some kind of folded-paper construction, and were those wings on either side of it?

"Undoubtedly, but some kind of tangential work would have oozed out into the periodicals. If anyone still alive there had understood the principle involved, they wouldn't have been able to resist the urge to hint at their brilliance."

"Hmmm." Tony's paper creation bounced off Bruce's nose. "You still haven't told me about the principle. I might understand it. Or be able to work it out. I'm brilliant."

"I don't know the principle behind it, myself. The arroyo guys only told me what it did, what it let _them_ do, not how it did it. And even though I saw it in action before I left, I can't extrapolate the underlying theory without something more than that to go on."

"Even though you're brilliant, too," Tony said, nodding. "So, what was it? Animal, vegetable, mineral, anti-gravity?"

Bruce snorted. "Whatever it was, whatever was done to those guys, it let them change the molecular density of objects. They couldn't do it from very far away, a few yards at most, but I saw one of them change an orange into a big cloud of orange-scented vapor, and an old soccer ball into a tiny solid sphere which was so dense it left a dent in the floorboards of the shack we were in. That was impressive, but what I saw the next day is why I keep thinking I'll see more about it in the papers some day.

"The shack we'd stayed in overnight and the next day was on the edge of a village, and that evening we heard a lot of shouting. And then when we heard kids start screaming, the arroyo guys and I went outside, and we saw a big burly man standing there in the middle of the square, holding something shiny in his hands and waving at a woman standing all by herself, a few yards away, who had a backpack strapped to her. He said he'd set off the bomb if everyone in the village didn't bring him what money and jewelry they had."

Tony winced. "Touchy situation."

"Uh-huh. I just stood there, trying to decide if the other guy could do something in time, and while I was thinking, one of the arroyo guys walked a few steps towards the woman, and then the woman was still standing there completely unharmed, but the backpack wasn't there, and a huge cloud of grey-white dust was, drifting away on the breeze like smoke. Then, the man with the trigger device yelled, and his hand started bleeding and something hit the ground right below it."

"You mean—?" Tony asked, "Really?"

"Yeah. He diffused the bomb," Bruce said, "and increased the density of the trigger so much it fell _through_ the man's hand. We left the village right away, before anyone could start asking questions of us, and we left the question of justice for the bomber to the villagers. But before the three arroyo guys and I parted ways, when I asked if I could do anything for them, the guy who'd done it said—and I think he was joking, but I'm really not sure—to just watch the papers for stories about Soliders of Fortune."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm only sorry I wasn't able to fit "led/lead" into this. A fic for another day, perhaps.


End file.
